Are You Tracking Your Marketing ROI?

Tracking marketing ROI can be challenging, but it’s a vital element of your company’s financial success. To understand what’s working in your marketing strategy—and what’s not—you need to start by setting goals and knowing what’s important to measure, then consistently track your progress toward meeting those goals.

In today’s post, we’ll take a look at the importance of tracking ROI and some best practices to follow.

Why Track Marketing ROI?

Tracking ROI consistently provides critical data to enable you to make informed decisions in several key areas.

• It enables you to look at your marketing results objectively. To know if your content marketing or social media strategy is working, you need to rely on data—opinions don’t matter.

• It provides you with the information you need to make decisions about your campaign. For example, if your social ads are not getting clicks, you can make adjustments to your ad copy or images to improve results. If your radio spot is not driving traffic to your website or your store, you may want to consider changing the frequency.

• It helps you allocate marketing resources more effectively. If you are not tracking your marketing ROI, there’s no way to know what efforts are providing the best ROI, and which you should ditch or continue pursuing in your future plans.

• It also helps in making decisions about other parts of your budget, such as resources allocated to expanding your business, hiring more personnel, or buying new equipment or tools.

Tips for Tracking ROI

• You don’t have to track everything—and you shouldn’t. Track the metrics that are most relevant for your business to ensure you’re making progress toward your goals, and make adjustments where needed.

• Remember that time is money. If you try to track too many things, you may end up spending too much time measuring, analyzing, and making adjustments. It’s important to strike the right balance.

• Consistency is key. Once you’ve decided what you need to track, ensure that you’re doing so on a regular schedule. A commitment to consistent measurement enables you to spot opportunities for improving results.

• Act on what the numbers tell you. If a particular strategy or platform is consistently underperforming, don’t throw good money after bad. Even if your upfront investment was significant, it’s better to consider it a learning experience and move on. Use what you learn to avoid future mistakes.

Developing and deploying a marketing strategy is not enough. If you aren’t tracking results, you could be wasting money. Conversely, you might give up on ads that don’t seem to be working when the numbers would show that you’re gaining traction.

Understanding what you want to measure and acting on the data you collect will enable you to better allocate resources and improve your marketing ROI.